"After the Deluge" at the Met
The latest thing in museum exhibitions is the show assembled by a living artist, either from his or her own work, from the museum's collection, or both. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched its first such show, giving Kara Walker carte blanche to fill one of the rooms on the out-of-the-way mezzanine at the rear of the building. Although she began devising the show about a year ago, her focus was galvanized by the ruin of New Orleans in August. "After the Deluge" is a haunting exhibition of formidable documentary power. Everything in the show is supercharged by its context.
Kara Walker's art is based on the cut-paper silhouette, and I have long wanted to see it in person. The silhouette was a precursor of the snapshot, but there was nothing candid about it. Subjects sat or stood in profile. They held themselves erect and still. Ms Walker keeps the profile but loses the stillness. Some of her figures are grotesques, such as the creature with alligator's body and the black child's head. Bizarre sexual contacts that seem far beyond pornography are not uncommon, and dismemberment (particularly of woman's legs) figures in not a few of Ms Walker's cut-outs. What makes all of this both palatable and even more surprising is the sweetness of Ms Walker's line. (Many of her shapes are quite large, and her outlines are so firmly fluid that I wonder how she cuts them.) The black figures are usually caricatures, "pickaninnies," and the overall impact of her work highlights the erasure of personal identity and distinction that racism effects.
This is art that teeters on the edge of oratory. It is too complex, too visually absorbing to fall into sheer reference. It is not about the evils of slavery, but about the terrible mess that slavery (and racism) creates - a mess that, as the aftermath of Katrina makes quite clear, hasn't been cleaned up. If I am still shocked at the nakedness of the racist contempt at work in New Orleans, I am completely unpersuaded that it is "really" an economic discrimination. The whites of Louisiana are letting us all know that they look down on black skin and black folkways; that they want to put the minus back in minority. Kara Walker's work expresses the "murk," as she puts it, that receding floodwaters, whether of Katrina or of segregation, have exposed.
Ms Walker has chosen works that either intensify the murk by broadening the referents - to encompass Noah's Flood, for example - or make it stink by denying it. Among the latter are small oils by William P Chappell, scenes of New York life in 1810 painted in the 1870s, as if recalling a bucolic ante-bellum fantasy. The more powerful statements underline Ms Walker's cut-outs. There are two very strong Homers, The Gulf Stream (1899), which is very well-known, and Dancing for the Carnival (1877), which is not. Both portray blacks as "other" in ways other than dark skin. Christ's Descent into Hell, a mid-sixteenth century painting in the school of Hieronymus Bosch, takes on a fresh shade of nightmare from the surrounding work.
Just beyond "After the Deluge," the museum has mounted a fifteen-panel Walker from its own collection, Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). Here, Ms Walker has enlarged lithographs from Civil-War issues of the famous magazine that show various battle scenes in the leaden, almost ceremonious style characteristic of popular illustration of the time. Atop these, she has superimposed various cut-outs, several with further cut-outs within them. These latter are negatives of a sort, allowing the lithographs to show through. The strange child cut out from the center of a larger cut-out itself appears in a separate panel. In my favorite, "Buzzard's Roost Pass," cannons boom and shells explode over a lake. Atop this scene, Ms Walker has superimposed the gigantic (in scale) head of a laughing black face, its neck ripped away from a body that is unseen but for two tossed breasts, and, outside the frame of the original lithograph, an extended arm. Two further cut-outs taken from the face mirror the starbursts of the exploding shells. The contrast of starch and snazz takes irony to an almost mystical level.
A word of caution: the Kara Walker book on sale at the museums various points of sale is not a catalogue of "After the Deluge," but the catalogue of an earlier Walker show elsewhere.
